When I told a friend of mine that I had enjoyed Puss in Boots, he said that one probably had to be a cat-lover to find it cute and funny.
That may be the case. You certainly won’t take to it if you’re one of those who regard domestic cats as unjustly glorified vermin who have been leeching off humanity for millennia without doing anything much in return except look nice.
When I told another friend I’d enjoyed Puss in Boots, he said my critical sensibility had obviously decayed through over-exposure to the kinds of nonsense I have to see a lot of, and that it was probably only any good in comparison with the other rubbish purveyed in the form of expensive kiddies’ entertainment. This may also be true.
Still, I liked it a lot. I found it amusing, even if the tale is a rehash of various fairytales mashed up into one of those Hollywood plots in which individual scenes such as chases are works of consummate skill but which, overall, haven’t much originality.
The main thing, with this kind of storyline, is to keep it moving, to keep the chases and so on coming, barely allowing the viewer any time for reflection — except for a few pauses to outline some basic psychology and thus provide the characters with motivation.
You wouldn’t have thought fairytale characters, not to mention cats, needed much motivation. In this case, pure ego and greed are largely sufficient — Puss and his sidekicks are after some magic beans that will grow into a huge beanstalk they can climb to steal the eggs laid by the golden goose in a castle in the sky. This is not so much a matter of glamourising vermin as glamourising crime, but you’ve got to give your characters a goal, even if it’s venal.
An impossible dream
And there is some extra psychologising offered to explain the relationship between Puss and Humpty Dumpty, who is the criminal mastermind with the big plan. The rationale is that the cat and the egg grew up together in an orphanage, and as children (or as kitten and egglet) shared a dream of … What? Getting away? Getting rich? Having adventures? Something along those lines. You’ve got to have a dream, even in a fairytale, it seems; you’ve got to have had a childhood too. Eggs usually grow up to be fragments, for a chick must emerge, or they meet their destiny sunny-side-up, but this is Fantasyland.
Puss in Boots is, of course, a spin-off of the Shrek movies, in which Puss was Shrek’s sidekick. Now he gets a movie of his own, sensibly enough; it obviously had the potential for lots of derring-do, which was not likely to be the case with Shrek’s other sidekick, Donkey.
Thus Puss in Boots is technically a prequel to the Shreks, as well as a return to some of the eye-popping action in the first Shrek, most memorably the dragon chase. Here we have a few such chases, perhaps most thrillingly one to do with an armoured stagecoach rattling hell for leather down a series of canyons.
Puss is voiced seductively by Antonio Banderas, which makes all the difference; for anyone who’s ever seen a Shrek, Puss is Antonio Banderas. The Spanish accent is laid on fairly thick (though, oddly, his coeval Humpty is plain American), in a way not unlike that of Manuel in Fawlty Towers, but with additional self-regard, swashbuckling flair and tom-catting flirtatiousness.
Flamenco felines
To be flirted with is Kitty Softpaws, voiced by Salma Hayek, who accompanied Banderas in that Once Upon a Time in Mexico folderol. She makes a good foil, and they have a marvellous “dance fight”, as befits some felines of the underworld with a bit of flamenco in their blood.
The chief appeal of Puss in Boots, for me at least, felinophile or not, is that it’s funny. Nothing deep or significant — but, like the action, it keeps coming. It’s a matter of some situational humour as well as a certain amount of actual wit, enough of it to keep one smiling or laughing until the end.
There are moments when the humour is almost smothered by sentimentality, but like Puss it manages to squeak through such peril and come out the other side with a knowing wink. It’ll do.
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